Shon Weissman is clearly in this season the shooting star of the Wolsfberger AC as he is currently the top goal scorer of the league with 22 goals. The team of the new head coach Ferdinand Feldhofer sit after the opening 22 games of the season in the comfortable fourth place and showed in this season several good performances.
However, besides the Israeli Weissman, the second player who received quite some attention in this season is the 20-years-old central midfielder Romano Schmid who is on loan from Bundesliga club Werder Bremen. The young Austrian is clearly one of the greatest talents we have in Austria in the central midfield position and plays a decent campaign.
Because of that, we’ll look in this tactical analysis in the form of a scout report on Schmid’s abilities and show why he can become one of the best central midfielders Austria has seen in the last few years.
Positioning and movement
Gerhard Struber implemented the 4-3-1-2 formation at Wolfsberg before he joined in November 2019 Barnsley and left the Austrian side. However, neither the interim manager Mohamed Sahli nor the new head coach Feldhofer switched the system. Considering this, the Wolfsberger AC are one of the very few clubs in Austria’s top-flight which used the same formation throughout the season.
During the first part of the season, the starting XI looked mostly the same and especially the midfield four consisted mainly out of the same four players with Mario Leitgeb as the defensive midfielder in the centre, Schmid on the right side, Marcel Ritzmaier on the left and Michael Liendl behind the two strikers. Since Ritzmaier followed Struber and joined Barnsley in the winter transfer window, Wolfsberg bought Miloš Jojić to replace him. Now, Jojić played in the last few games after the winter break on the right side which meant that Schmid would have to go to the left. This also explains why the heatmap shows that he mainly played on the right side and that he isn’t that often on the left. That’s logical as he made 17 appearances on the right side in the first part of the season, and after the winter break four on the left side.
However, what we also can clearly see is that he seems to be quite flexible as he occupies the wide-areas, but also the half-spaces and a bit of the centre too. Since you have no real wingers in a 4-3-1-2, this formation can be extremely fluid as sometimes the full-backs provide the width and in other moments the midfielder or even the striker drift to the outside. We will look at Schmid’s movements and tactics during Wolfsberg’s possession phases in the following sections of this tactical analysis, but in the image below we can see his positioning when the opposition are on the ball. As one of the two outer midfielders, the 20-year-old has to stay in the half-spaces, so he can quickly move to the wing if necessary, but also being near the centre. In the situation below his good positioning and anticipation help him to intercept the pass.
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